06May13

German police arrest alleged former Auschwitz guard Lipschis

German police on Monday arrested a suspected former guard at the Auschwitz
death camp and Nazi-hunting group Simon Wiesenthal named him as Hans
Lipschis.

Prosecutors in the southwestern city of Stuttgart did not name the man but said
police had arrested a 93-year-old alleged former Auschwitz guard with the
"strong suspicion" he was involved in murder there.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center said it welcomed the arrest of Lipschis - fourth
on its list of most wanted Nazi criminals.

"The arrest of Lipschis is a welcome first step in what we hope will be a large
number of successful legal measures taken by the German judicial authorities
against death camp personnel and those who served in the Einsatzgruppen
(mobile killing units)," said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israel office of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, in an emailed statement.

The arrest was made possible by the 2011 conviction in Munich of Sobibor
death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk, the first Nazi war criminal convicted in
Germany, without evidence of a specific crime or a specific victim, the Center's
email said.

Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. mechanic, died in March last year aged 91. A
Munich court convicted him in 2011 for his role in the killing of 28,000 Jews as
a Nazi death camp guard.

Lipschis, interviewed in German newspaper Die Welt last month, said he had
been a cook in the camp and had left the camp to fight on the Eastern Front,
although he could not remember which unit he was in.

Stuttgart prosecutors said the man arrested on Monday had worked at the
extermination camp during World War Two, from 1941 until its liberation in
1945. Authorities had searched his flat, taken him into custody and were
preparing charges against him.

The Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, at Auschwitz,
near the Polish village of Oswiecim.

News of the arrest came on the same day the surviving member of a German
neo-Nazi cell went on trial for a series of racist murders that have scandalized
Germany and exposed the security services' inability or reluctance to
recognize far-right crime.

[Source: Reuters, Stutgart, 06May13]

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